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Rigid-Body Motion
Mechanical Event Simulation (MES) with linear and nonlinear material models can calculate large-scale motion including rigid-body motion. When simulating rigid-body motion (or kinematic motion), the model is assumed to be infinitely stiff and inflexible. Typically, rigid-body motion occurs in coupled mechanisms; however, the model can be completely unconstrained, allowing movement in any of the six translational or rotational degrees of freedom. MES software calculates forces generated from rigid-body motion for combined motion and stress analysis. ALGOR's KinePak mechanism wizard enables users to conveniently generate common mechanisms that encounter rigid-body motion:
For applications where rigid-body motion is the only result of interest and stresses are not important, 2- and 3-D kinematic elements can be used. Kinematic elements are rigid elements that move like regular, flexible finite elements. They do not experience strain and thus do not report stresses. Otherwise, kinematic elements behave similarly to flexible elements; that is, they can have mass, loads applied on their nodes and/or faces and experience motion. Their advantage over flexible elements is that they barely contribute to the size of the global stiffness matrix. Thus, kinematic elements can be used to obtain quicker processing speed. Stresses can be determined for the kinematic element parts of the model at a particular time step by using the inertial load transfer capability, which transfers the inertial forces from an MES analysis to a copy of the model for subsequent stress analysis. In addition to rigid-body motion applications, kinematic elements can be used in models that also contain flexible elements. Rigid-body motion differs from linear flexible-body motion and nonlinear flexible-body motion, which MES can also simulate. TYPICAL APPLICATIONS
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